Bryan Schaaf: Welcome to Meat Speak, Powered by the Certified Angus Beef Brand
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Bryan Schaaf: Welcome to Meat Speak, powered by the Certified Angus Beef Brand. Chances are, this is the first time that you are tuning in to this little space on the intra podcasting world. And we appreciate you joining us. We appreciate joining us, we appreciate you giving us your ear for a bit of time. My name is Bryan. With me is Chef Tony Biggs. Chef, how are you doing? Tony Biggs: Bryan! It's great to see you. Wow, this is our first podcast. Bryan Schaaf: This is our first podcast. It's exciting. I've intentionally not drank quite as much coffee this morning, just because I'm so excited about where we're headed, you know it... when you talk about meat, right, and I want to make sure that everybody understands we're here to discuss meat. And meat in general. And we're not here taking a stance. We're not here to shift your line of thinking around meat. If you love meat, if you don't love meat, we are here to embrace what reality is, right? We are here to talk about meat, how it's showcased in various corners of the world, from chefs to butchers to farmers to meat scientists, and bringing some of the personalities to you of some of the people who have built their livelihood, their reputations around the sanctity of meat and the time honored tradition that it is. Bryan Schaaf: Chef you have cooked, I will say all corners of the world, but the world is round. So be that what you will, can you talk a little bit about where you have been? Tony Biggs: Well, you know Bryan, God it all started, originally I'm a seafood guy. I grew up on the coast of Massachusetts in a beautiful little seashore town of Cohasset. I started as a dishwasher. Pot washer at the Hugo's Lighthouse. Boy this was a great seafood house. Thousand covers a day and I washed all the chef's pots and pans until 4:00 in the morning. Making minimum wage. This was my first job. And from there I never looked back. I learned, you know I was a sponge. I wanted to know everything about culinary. It was in my blood. I met my father when I was 15 years old and he opened a five star restaurant in Clarence Center New York called the Granary Inn. I have done everything in that restaurant from park cars to sing. I was a singing waiter. That was the hook of our restaurant. Not only the food. This is the first time I had a filet mignon, and let me tell you that was an epiphany. Bryan Schaaf: So you started on filet mignon. Your career has taken you to an oil rig in the North Sea, to Tokyo American Club, to the Philippines with Imelda Marcos, to the Middle East, cooking for the King and Queen of Jordan, to post-Katrina New Orleans, and ultimately where we are here, if you happen to have access to your Google Maps and you would like to know, we are coming to you from the inner sanctum, from the basement of the World Headquarters of Certified Angus Beef, which is about 40 miles south of Cleveland, in a little town called Wooster Ohio where Chef, every day you get to deal with meat. You get to deal with steak. Tony Biggs: I have cooked all around the world, not necessarily beef in those cultural places where I was at, but now I started doing that. Let's give you an example: Indonesian beef [rendang 00:03:51]. That is an Indonesian beef stew stewed in coconut milk. [Galangal 00:03:58], which is a type of ginger, and different spices, and it is just aromatic, served with rice, cinnamon sticks, braised for hours, and it is absolutely magical. Okay? I did this at the culinary center and... we do not teach people how to cook or be chefs, we give them ideas with our beef, and that's what we do. Not only that, gosh, Argentina, Francis Mallmann, my hero, has opened my eyes to fire cooking, and according to Gary [Maxted 00:04:37] from NorCal Oven Works, who designs all our churrasco barbecue equipment, he is selling more and more Michelin Star chefs around the world churrasco barbecue equipment because now those guys want to cook with fire. That is magical. Bryan Schaaf: You know it's funny you bring that up. If you look back through the history of mankind, I mean we're getting really deep here. You know, if you look back over the past two million years that humans have been on the Earth, before there were hunting tools, before there were things like that, humans would trap animals, right? I mean, they wouldn't use tools. I mean it sounds kind of funny now. They would literally ambush animals, wrestle them to the ground, and then harvest their meat. It wasn't until about 250 thousand years ago, and this is all just through research, and this is a notion that seems to be reasonably accepted across the scientific community. Scientists will surmise that it wasn't until humans began applying fire and heat to meat that we truly became human because by cooking that meat over fire, it actually made those cuts of meat that were once raw, more dense with calories, which gave the human body more energy which allowed our brains to develop to the point that they are now. Bryan Schaaf: If you look at a human versus a gorilla, the human brain is much larger than it should be for our bodies, but you could surmise that going all the way back to live fire cooking honestly is a reason that we are humans today, which I know is, it kind of blew my mind, coming across facts like that, but it's an interesting school of thought that now you're looking at because of folks like Francis Mallmann, Michelin star chefs, people with tweezers in their chef coats are going back to this idea that existed 250 thousand years ago. Tony Biggs: It's funny you should say that, because my new book that's going to come out is "From Tweezers to Pitchforks." Bryan Schaaf: Okay. Tony Biggs: That is the name of my new book, and two years ago when we were in San Antonio, I'm glad you brought this up, because one of our functions were at a ranch, but it was also an Indian burial ground. And it was up on a hill and we were given a tour of this area one day and the gentleman said to us, "You see this big hill up here, well the Indians, what they would do is they would get the buffalo at the edge of the cliff, and push them off, and they would fall and die. And that's how, they would come down the cliff and skin the buffalo and prepare their feast." So it's interesting that you would say that. Bryan Schaaf: That's fascinating. You know when I think of ambushing an animal, and I'm not a hunter, not because I'm necessarily opposed to hunting, I'm opposed to waking up at four AM sitting in a tree when it's 20 below zero. But when I think of ambushing an animal, I think of peacefully waiting for a deer to walk below and then just pounce on him, right? And wrestle it to the ground, so I appreciate that you have changed what ambushing an animal speaks to my psyche at least. Tony Biggs: Well there were no guns. It was natural. They had to eat. Folks had to eat back there. To your point, this was a way of survival. Okay, so you catch a chicken or a pheasant or a bird, or any kind of animal, a goat, and you prepare it as a feast for your family. We do it today but in a more civil way. Bryan Schaaf: That's right, we do our hunting at the grocery store. Tony Biggs: I love cooking with fire. When I picked up a Frances Mallmann book, you know I saw the things he was doing with fire, it was just a natural... you know he's a Michelin star chef and he just turned from the tweezers to the pitchfork and he does a marvelous job and he has restaurants all over the world. He's my hero. Bryan Schaaf: Chef that's a fantastic segue. We are going to take a break and we are going to come back with a chat with one of our good friends, a chef who, if you follow the lore of the American chefs, I mean there are a handful of icons that you can list, from honestly by one name, from Thomas to Grant to Trotter to Danielle to you name it. And our guest coming up here in a moment is one who very much fits into that group and he has opened so many different restaurants, from Rochester, New York to New York City, to Chicago where he kind of built his name. And he's opened up all kinds of different concepts from steak houses, to Italian, to probably his coup de grace is one of the best known fine dining restaurants in Chicago for more than two decades, to his current iteration which is actually a Cajun Creole restaurant down in the French Quarter in New Orleans.